Internet Freak-out Over Google's New Privacy Policy Proves Again That No One Actually Reads Privacy Policies

Google has the world calling it evil once again. (That's at least the third time in 2012. Kudos, Google.) This time it's thanks to a blog post Tuesday by Google's director of privacy announcing the company's plans to turn its 70+ privacy policies into just one that will apply to all of Google's products, from Gmail to Picasa to YouTube. Along with simplifying its privacy policy, Google is planning to have more overlap in your information from different services:

Our new Privacy Policy makes clear that, if you’re signed in, we may combine information you've provided from one service with information from other services. In short, we’ll treat you as a single user across all our products, which will mean a simpler, more intuitive Google experience.

Google has already given us a taste of that with the awkwardly-named "Search Plus Your World" (SPYW) -- which merges Google+ with Google search to give you more personal results. In a blog post tearing Google a new one and transforming Sergey Brin and Larry Page into evil demons via Photoshop, Mat Honan at Gizmodo calls this a "privacy policy shift." Actually, it's not.

Google keeps an archive of its privacy policies. Since at least October 2005 (!), the company has stated in the "Information you provide" section: "We may combine the information you submit under your account with information from other Google services or third parties in order to provide you with a better experience and to improve the quality of our services."

What's changing is not Google's privacy policies but its practices. By combining information from across all of its services, Google will be able to better target users with ads, offer more innovative features, and, importantly for Google, better compete with Facebook. Fellow Forbes writer David DiSalvo says Google is "saying goodbye to user privacy." I hate to tell you all, but Google already knew all these things about you -- to get a sense of how much Google knows about you, check out the Dashboard -- and already had permission to combine that info, they're just now actually going to do that. And kudos to them for being so explicit about that.

Over at TechCrunch, Devin Coldewey says the quick leap to calling Google evil shows that the tech press is currently biased against them.

Everyone wants so badly for Google to do something truly evil (instead of just questionable or inconvenient) that their perceptions of Google actions are actually being affected. Casting events systematically in a non-objective light is the exhibition of bias, and the continual presentation of policies one disagrees with as evidence of “evil” seems to fall under that category.

When Google starts bundling everything it knows about its users and selling that to insurance companies, background check companies, and the Department of Homeland Security, that's when I'll trot out the "evil label." But using information from Gmail to suggest more appropriate YouTube videos or reminding an Android smartphone user that they have a Google calendar appointment in a half hour on the other side of town doesn't strike me as the work of Lucifer.